[maemo-developers] Hibernation of applications during ptrace

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> As debugging info I usually get something like this:
> 
> ...
> hildon-desktop[25510]: GLIB DEBUG default - #### computing hibernation key ####
> hildon-desktop[25510]: GLIB DEBUG default - #### hibernation key: appname ####
> ...
> hildon-desktop[25510]: GLIB DEBUG default - removing child from AS ...
> hildon-desktop[25510]: GLIB DEBUG default - ... no more children, removing app.
> ...
> 
> Is there a way to completely disable all this stuff? I know about
> "run-standalone.sh": Even with this tool I am seeing various problems.
> 
> Especially when I run my application in gdb. I'd like to disable it
> "totally". For example: not starting it, patching it out and overwriting
> the library on my device and scratchbox environment, shooting it in the
> head before I start my debugging sessions, ... molesting it? Really
> hurting it? Anything!

Desktop kills only applications that have announced themselves to be 
killable.  Application should do that only when they've saved state,
are in the background (i.e. not interacting with the user) and able
to restore the state when restarted.  I.e. it would be a problem in
the application I think.

And desktop does this only when it's notified that the device is low
on memory.  So, close extra applications and if that doesn't help,
add swap.  You might also try using gdbserver as Gdb can take quite
a lot of memory.


Another alternative is that the device runs so low on memory that
your application is OOM-killed.  You can see this from the syslog.
In this case add swap or use gdbserver.  If you know that the device
should still survive with the amount of memory Gdb and your app
are using, you could set those processes OOM-protected with:
	echo -17 > /proc/PID/oom_adj
And OOM-unprotect it afterwards by using "0" instead of -17 (as root
of course), but don't be surprised if the device reboots if they
use too much memory. :-)


	- Eero